


Promises Kept

by RavensWing



Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, F/M, I wrote this a long time ago, This is not a happy thing, cross post, for real, ghost prompt, it ends happy-ish but it is rough ride, so go away if you want a nice fluffy thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-10
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-09-15 18:49:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16938729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RavensWing/pseuds/RavensWing
Summary: It was only a mile down the road, a mile she had driven hundreds - thousands of times. It was a well known mile. A friendly mile (if miles could be friendly). A mile she always wholeheartedly enjoys driving because it is mile that leads her between her two favorite people in the entire universe: her husband and her sister.As far as places to die go, she supposes that it could be worse.





	Promises Kept

**Author's Note:**

> This was a prompt filled on Tumblr for a friend and now I am cross posting over here. Seriously though if you want something happy don't read this.

 

She should have listened to him. **  
**

She should have stayed in and not gone over to Elsa’s for their traditional Tuesday sister’s movie night, but the weather had not been bad when she kissed him goodbye.

She should have told Elsa ‘no’ when she poured her that third glass of wine.

She should have decided to spend the night on the couch when they both heard the sleet begin to fall on the roof.

She should have done a lot of things, but hindsight is better than foresight one hundred percent of the time - especially when you are dead.

She remembers the logic that made her hug her sister goodbye and walk out that door. She remembers how she slipped walking to her car and made a face at Elsa who watched her worriedly from her porch, arms crossed over her chest.

It was only a mile down the road, a mile she had driven hundreds - thousands of times. It was a well known mile. A friendly mile (if miles could be friendly). A mile she always wholeheartedly enjoys driving because it is mile that leads her between her two favorite people in the entire universe: her husband and her sister.

As far as places to die go, she supposes that it could be worse.

* * *

 

You don’t worry about things when you are dead in the same way you worry about things when you are alive. It’s cliche, she knows, the way she dies and at one point (the alive point) that would have bothered her. Slightly buzzed driver hits a patch of black ice on a familiar route and crashes into a tree: that story has been told. Her story has been told, will be told on the morning news, and as the glass and metal shatter and crunch around her she almost laughs.

She knows better than this, or at least she did.

Being in past-tense is weird.

* * *

 

When she opens her eyes - she is on her front porch. Her car is not in the driveway. She does not have her keys, her purse, but she is there. She is there, but she knows she is not. She can feel it. She is between, but she is here, and she will not question it.

The door knob stares back at her. It takes her several moment to reach out and grab it, uncertain if her hand will pass through it like the movies or some other unfortunate occurrence that pop culture has told her happens in the afterlife, but when she reaches for the handle her grip is firm around the handle. She turns, pushes, and then she is inside.

She is only slightly bummed that she did not get to float through the door.

Maybe next time.

* * *

 

He is in the kitchen. She can tell by the smell that he is cooking (most likely their lunches to pack for the next few days). The sound of the stereo floats through the space. She knows he is singing along under his breath. She always tells him she likes his singing, encourages it, but he always freezes up whenever he knows she is listening.

Maybe he won’t be able to hear her now, see her. Maybe she will go into the kitchen and he will keep singing and she will be able to watch him like she isn’t even there, because she isn’t. She is dead, but she does not know how to address that so she goes the kitchen and pretends like nothing has changed.

Like clockwork, he looks up from the stove on the center island and fumbles to grab the stereo remote.

“You’re home!” He blushes, and the sight of it makes her wonder if she has blood at this point. If she cuts herself, will she bleed?

“Yeah.” She shrugs off her ghost-coat (it is her favorite one so if she is cursed or wear it for all of eternity at least she likes it). “You look surprised?”

“Well. You just left like - ten minutes ago?” He is sauteing vegetables and chicken. Normally the sight alone would make her ravenous but she realizes that she isn’t hungry, or thirsty. She doesn’t even seem to have saliva to wet her tongue.

Ten minutes ago? But that isn’t possible. She has been at Elsa’s for almost four hours. She looks at the clock on the microwave. The green, glowing numbers read _6:47_. She’d left Elsa’s just past eleven. How is that possible? How is any of this possible?

“Roads were bad then, yeah?” He asks and she tries to tell him what is happening, but her mouths won’t form around the words and not for lack of trying. They just won’t come out.

 _I think I’m dead._ She wants to scream, but an invisible fist grabs them and shoves them down deep inside.

She coughs and then: “Yeah. They’re killer”

* * *

 

She stops breathing on purpose just to see what happens. She has always been good at holding her breath, but five minutes pass and she does not feel she does not feel light headed or weak. She can speak without struggling. If she is turning blue, Kristoff doesn’t say anything.  

She presses her her hand to her chest and feels nothing. She opens her mouth to tell him. _My heart isn’t beating._ If she cannot tell him directly, perhaps she can tell him indirectly, but even that is a lost cause.  

He looks at her across the kitchen island to where she is perched in the bar stool and arches his eyebrow.

“You look like you’re choking.” He flips the food in the pan. “You aren’t, are you?”

“No.” The moment she tries to speak about something other than her death - the words pops out immediately and then she gets it. “Not choking.”

It is not important that she is dead. Well - it is, but it is more important that she is _here_. She is _here_ with _him_ and she is struck now by what a gift that is (even if the gift has terms).

So she forces herself to breathe, even though she doesn’t need to, even though the power of his smile is enough to kill her a second time.

* * *

 

She lies.

If she was alive it would have been impossible. She would have blushed and stuttered and felt _awful_ about it, and she doesn’t want to say that being dead has made her ambivalent (it definitely hasn’t - she cares _a lot_ about what is happening here), but somehow she just doesn’t care so much about slippery things like ‘the truth’. Maybe it is because it seems like space and time have bent to bring her here. Maybe it is because if she is already dead she is not really sure things like little, white lies actually matter.

Whatever the reason is she lies and says she had texted Elsa about her absence (her phone is in her wrecked car somewhere along her shattered body in some other part of time). She is not certain how she got here, four hours before she knows she died, but here she is and she won’t fight it. She figures if Elsa really wants to know where she is she will call and prove that this intense feeling of strangeness is nothing more than a dream.

Kristoff dumps a skillet full of chicken and veg into a Tupperware they had gotten off of their registry and wipes his forehead.

“So you want to watch something with me instead?” He asks like this is a normal night, like this is a night that they will have again and again until they are old and gray, or he is old and gray and she is - a ghost?

No. She’s too solid to be a ghost. She can touch and smell and feel. She is solid. She has weight. She isn’t much of a zombie either, or a vampire. She has no appetite for anything - much less human brains and blood. But she isn’t real either.

“Anna?” He snaps her out of it as he puts the dirty dishes in the sink and washes his hands.

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. Let’s do that.”

* * *

 

It’s a weird thing to feel yourself becoming _less_ : less solid, less tangible, less real. But she can feel it happening in degrees. A spot just beneath her left ribs - her most ticklish spot - is softer than normal as if its very fibers are unweaving.

She is snuggled up to him on the couch. His arm around her shoulder, hand resting dangerously close to her unbeating heart, and she thinks it is so strange to feel him like this. He is so solid, and she is coming apart. If she were alive the idea would make her panic, but she knows now that this is fine.

There is more after death.

She is proof of that.

And if the Powers the Be sent her back here to him it must be because they are meant to find each other. She is meant to find him. He is meant to find her. Still when she looks up at him her chest is filled with a pulsing longing, sadness.

He looks down at her when he notices her gaze.

“What’s up?”

“Do we have any ice cream?” She is not hungry, but she feels restless on the couch next to him. Like whatever thing has sent her back here now is not pleased with her choice to spend whatever time she has with him curled on the couch watching Jeopardy like they do every night.

He turns and brushes a kiss over her temple as is his habit every time he cheats into her on their couch. “In the freezer, I think. You want me to get you some?”

She looks up at him then and sees him so close that he blurs in her field of vision. He is so warm. So solid. When he had first come around the kitchen island and wrapped her in a hug she had not been certain his arms would not pass right through her, but they hadn’t. They had pulled her close and now those same arms keep her close. She wants to tell him to hold tighter - to squeeze until it hurts - because she feels herself becoming less and less solid with each passing moment.

“No.” The urgency to press into him burns into her core. “Don’t leave me.”

“Never.” His arm tightens and his brow furrows. “Is everything okay?”

She hears the sleet start outside and for the first time since she has come back on her own porch she feels a sense of urgency.

“No. It’s not okay.”

“Anna -”

He looks so confused, caught off guard, and it feels like a taste for what is to come when he realizes that she is not actually there.

It spurs her to action.

She surges up to kiss him. For one instant she is certain her lips actually meld with his - pieces of her breaking apart to make room for him - before reforming and meeting his.

“Make love to me.” She is already climbing onto his lap as she speaks. “Make love to me like my life depends on it.”

She knows that it doesn’t. She is already dead. She knows it won’t change the fact that she is dead, but her soul is burning with a need older than life.

He doesn’t hesitate. He pulls her down to meet his mouth. She loves how he never needs encouragement to enjoy her body - to worship her with his mouth - and she does not stop him. She lets him devour her. The heat inside of her, so different from anything she ever felt while living, like the love of him is its own living thing inside of her.

She grabs his face and pulls back just enough to see his eyes swimming in front of hers.

“If anything ever happens to me - you have to promise me that you will be okay. You can be sad for a little while, but you have to try to be happy again. Promise me.”

He brushes the hair out of her eyes, brow puckered. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”

“But if it _does_ -”

“Anna. Stop it. You’re freaking me out.”

“Kristoff I need you to promise.”

“Okay. What am I promising?”

The way he looks at her, like he will jump off a cliff onto a bed of nails if she asks, makes her unbeating heart clench. She cannot be the cause of his eternal unhappiness. He is a good man, a strong man, and he deserves to be happy even when she fade to nothing more than a memory.

A deep breath and then, “That you will be whole and happy if I am not here anymore.”

And even in death, even in the strange state of not caring that she has stumbled upon, she cares very much about his answer. She cares very much about the subtle passes of emotions that play across his face, the way his eyes dart over her countenance as if he can guess the cause of her request, but she knows he will never stumble upon it. He is a steady man, even-keeled and subscriber of the possible. It will not even so much as cross his mind that this is a warning - that she is already dead.

Instead he looks at her with curious eyes, deep and melting. A funny smile quirks his lips. A large, hot hand comes up again to cup her cheek with tenderness that always surprises her.

“If you need me to, I promise. I promise to find a way to be whole and happy if you ever leave me.”

He could make a joke of this. She knows he could with that dry wit, his sharp tongue, but instead he uses that tongue to claim the inside of her mouth.

This is a chance for her to love him - to give him comfort before she is gone.

She grinds down and finds his desire waiting for her. Her hand goes to her pants, his, and unfastens them both. It is only a few deft moves before she is naked on her back on the sofa - Jeopardy long forgotten - as he works a finger, two, into her depths. The stretch is familiar but she doesn’t need the preliminaries. Her body is ready of him.

She pulls him on top of her and lines him up. He drives home on the first stroke, hard and heavy. She thinks maybe she is sweating, or maybe that is him. The slick skin of their bellies, his chest, her breast, slide along each other while the blue light of the TV flashes over them like a halfhearted strobe. She feels the rhythm of him in her like a new heart, pounding a relentless truth into her body.

 _I love you. I love you. I love you._ She hears herself chanting the words she feels him pressing into her core with each stroke.

 _I love you. I love you. I love you._ She lifts her hips to meet his, spine snapping back as orgasm wraps her like a live wire and she breaks.

“Let’s finish this in bed.” She whispers into his ear.

He moves to turn off the lights, the TV, but there is no time for that. She can feel herself slipping away - growing less substantial as each second goes by, and she will not waste those instants. She will have him again in their marriage bed.

They tumble together, graceless, up the stairs. She laces her fingers through his and pull him against her body. He is still hard, sticky from being inside of her already, and she pushes him onto the bed.

Her thin thighs straddle his hips as she climbs onto the bed and mounts him. She sinks down with a moan. She thinks of crying, doesn’t actually cry, as her eyes refuse to create drops despite their burning. Maybe that is a ghost perk, but she is too gone to care. The feeling of him inside of her is so entirely right she cannot imagine waiting even a single day on the other side without him.

It isn’t fair.

She isn’t supposed to be a statistic (unless it is for being part of one of those couples with an insanely long marriage) yet here she is.

Here, but not here.

But she knows as she presses down on him, rises back up, that no matter where she is in this life or whatever comes after - she will always be here with him. Always.

She throws her head back and rides him for all he’s worth.

* * *

 

“I love you, Kristoff. I love you more than anything. You know that, right?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Don’t forget.”

“I don’t think you’d let me.”

“But if I wasn’t here - if something happened - promise me you won’t forget. Promise me that if I’m not here that you will find a way to be happy.”

“Why aren’t you going to be here exactly?

“…That’s not important. What’s important is that you know I love you. What’s important is that you are happy even if I am gone.

“You’re awfully caught up on that.”

“I just need to hear you say it. Promise me. Just one more time. Please.”

“I love you and I promise to find happiness even if you aren’t with me.”

“Thank you.” She kisses him. “Thank you.”

* * *

 

They talk late into the night. She had not expected to grow tired, but she did. She didn’t know you could be tired when you were dead - or maybe this is really it. Maybe she is only half-dead and now she is going to be whole-dead, but she doesn’t mind. She doesn’t fight it, but she will miss him. She will wait for him knowing that when the time is right - he will find her again.

Her eyelids droop in time with his and she tries to fight it. She does not want to close them. She wants to stare at his face, take in every freckle and hair in all of its amazing detail, one final time. She wants to memorize the feel of him against her as this is the last time she will hold him like this and her arms ache with the need to keep him close, but she cannot.

She is beyond that ability now.

So she tries as long as she is able to stay awake, to stay solid, as she presses as close to him as she is able. He mumbles something sweet and soft into her hair. She cannot make out the words, and that sends a funny twinge into her body. She will have to ask him what he said when he meets her on the other side, because she knows they will.

She _knows_ it, and so tonight - or for however long she is allowed with him - she will bask in his presence. She will soak in every smile, every touch, until she is gone and then she will wait for him.

She will wait for him and then, maybe, if this is how the whole thing works, she will have had enough time to petition The Powers That Be to send them back together. Or to let them stay in the blessed afterlife together. Or something.

She doesn’t know how that works yet exactly, but she will figure it out.

What she does know is that she is dead, that she cannot stay much longer on this earth, but that this death is nothing in comparison for her love.

With that, she closes her eyes.

* * *

 

She is not in bed when he wakes. The place where she normally sleeps is empty and that is strange. She never wakes up before he does.

He pads into the bathroom to relieve himself and he hears the TV on downstairs. She had been in a strange mood the night before. Maybe she couldn’t sleep. Maybe she is watching something to keep herself entertained before he wakes up.

He flushes and heads downstairs.

“Anna?”

The morning news is on the screen, but Anna is not on the couch. She is not in the kitchen. She isn’t anywhere even though all the lights are on. A cold sweat breaks out on the back of his neck.

Then the phone rings.

* * *

 

It is the night after the morning they found Anna’s body and Kristoff goes to Elsa’s. He knows she won’t ask, he won’t either, but they both cannot be alone right now.

The sit on opposite sides of the living room, shaking hands hold glasses of whiskey.

“No. She was at my house watching _Serendipity_ with me then. How could she has been at your house at the same time.”

“I don’t know. But she was _there_. She was there.”

He takes a long sip of whiskey, Elsa sits quietly for a moment.

Then: “We cannot both be correct, Kristoff.”

He knows that. He also knows that she had been there in their house last night. He nods and Elsa nods. They won’t speak of this again.

* * *

 

He stops watching Jeopardy. He moves into the guest room. He takes down her pictures and puts them in a box for safe keeping.

Still he sees her around every corner. Hears her down the hall. Feels her climb under the covers each night. But she isn’t there. She is gone.

After two months of sleepless nights he puts the house on the market. It sells. He moves in with Elsa, but he doesn’t move on. He doesn’t know how.

* * *

 

He buys a chainsaw and cuts down the tree that took her from him.

He chops into it right at the scar where her car had impacted the trunk. He slices it to pieces and loads what he can into his truck and stacks the rest down on the side of the hill. He drives to Elsa’s house and picks her up. She doesn’t ask questions, sees the contents of the bed of his truck, and he can see that she understands his intent. He drives them to the middle of nowhere and stacks the branches in a field. A little kerosene and a match later and the branches go up in flames.

They watch till the pile burns to embers.

* * *

 

He visits her grave at least once a week, bringing flowers - cleaning up her tombstone, but it isn’t until about six months later that he speaks to her. A crocus is pressing up out of the ground above her, like she is saying hello, and he feels something thaw just enough in his own throat to let the words bloom.

“You came back to me.” His voice is low and rough. “I know that now. I don’t know how, but you did and -” his throat tightens. He takes a moment and clears his throat again. “I don’t suppose there is a way you can come back to me now?”

He stares at the crocus, waiting, feeling stupid and self conscious. His face heats with embarrassment. She is dead. She cannot hear him. He scrubs the back of his hand under his nose, across his eyes.

Dead people don’t come back. He knows that. So why is he staring at a crocus?

“I love you.” He cannot stop the words from tumbling out. “I love you. Please.”

He can feel himself crumbling. The walls he put up in the minutes, hours, days, week, months after her death crash down around his ears just at the sound of those words. _I love you_. He can still hear all the ways she could say that phrase, from sing-song to sultry, and the words break over him like a tide.

 _This is grief._ The thought jumps into his mind and he wants to scream against it for its obvious stupidity. _This is what you get for loving someone._

He turns on a heel and stomps back to his truck. The crushed flowers in his fist hit the still-frosted ground along the path he walks. He throws open the driver’s side door of his truck when it hits him.

It feels like the wind, like air, wrapping around him but the trees are still. There is no movement, but he can feel something. A chill runs down his spine.

 _You promised_. He can hear her teasing voice, feel her breath in the shell of his ear, and he shivers.

“You left.”

_I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to leave._

It is like she is right there, but he cannot hold her. His arms hang like useless branches at his side and it burns.

“Come back.” His throat tightens. “Come back to me.”

_I’m always right here._

“I miss you.” Tears he has held back for months well in his eyes. “Please. Please.”

_You promised._

He hits his knees. He knows just to what promise she is referring and the weight of it is too much. How can he be happy without her?

“I can’t.” Hot, twin rivers course down his cheeks. “I’m sorry. I’m so s-sorry.”

 _You can. You will._ He can practically feel her rest against his back, her arms around his shoulders, and that only makes him cry harder. _Not all at once, but a little at a time._

“I love you. I still love you.”

_I love you, too._

He buries his face in his hands and sobs.

* * *

 

He never feels her again the same way no matter how many times he goes back to her grave. He supposes he should be grateful, but he is mostly furious.

How could she leave him?

How could she make him promise to find happiness without her?

He punches the tombstone hard enough to fracture his hand.

* * *

 

“You can’t just go around punching things.” Elsa says, re-wrapping his splint after his shower.

“You can’t just go through a pack a day and not expect me to notice.” He’s seen the ashtray on her porch.

They leave each other to their self destruction.

* * *

 

A dark fog shrouds his shoulders, his mind. He cannot taste anything, doesn’t care that he cannot taste anything.

“You’re losing weight.” Elsa points out after she takes a long drag off of her cigarette. She doesn’t hide her smoking anymore.

“I could stand to lose a few pounds.”

“Not like this.”

He shrugs. Maybe he should care, but he just doesn’t. He eats a banana to appease her and then goes to bed.

….

He has been in bed for three days straight when Elsa comes into his room and puts an orange pill bottle on his nightstand.

“These are mine, but you should probably take some.”

He squints at the label and recognizes a popular antidepressant brand.

“I’m not depressed.”

“Bull shit.”

“I’m not.”

“Fine.” She takes the bottle, opens it, and puts a single pill on his stand in its place. “But you need to take this. Consider it part of paying rent.”

“I already pay rent.”

Elsa huffs - clearly annoyed.

“Look. We both lost Anna. I’m not going to lose you, too.”

He looks up at her from his bed then and for the first time in forever - he feels something.

 _You promised._ Her voice whispers and that something feels an awful lot like guilt. But hell - guilt is better than nothing.

He sits up and scrubs a hand over his scruffy face. “Isn’t it bad for me to take a pill that isn’t prescribed for me? I might die or something.” The idea is not entirely unappealing.

_You promised._

“Step one is get you out of bed. Step two is getting you to a therapist so you can get your own damn pills”

* * *

 

He isn’t much of a therapy guy. The whole sitting on a couch while a stranger picks apart your thoughts never appealed to him, but Elsa said this therapist came highly recommended and Kristoff has a promise to keep. So he goes. He does the work. He takes the medication prescribed to him.

Slowly, color begins to slip back in around the edges of his life. His entire existence is no longer just him floating in and out of different levels of apathy. Food tastes like something again.

He still misses her, cannot really think about anything except her still, but it is no longer tinged with blue. Anna had taught him what it meant to truly live, to love, to be happy. He knows how to use that as a reference point for life now instead of using it as an unending well of sadness. He hopes that wherever Anna is that she sees this and that she is pleased.

* * *

 

“You’re smiling again.” Elsa says from her chair across the living room. He is sprawled out on the couch watching _The Office_.

“So are you.” Kristoff doesn’t look at Elsa. They don’t normally talk about stuff like this - but she is right. He is smiling again, and so is she.

Part of him feel strange to smile when Anna cannot anymore.

 _Survivor’s guilt_ , his therapist would say.

 _Common_ , his therapist would say.

 _It is okay to feel those things, but only if you also tell yourself the truth. It is not your fault that Anna is gone._ His therapist would say - but for the first time since Kristoff had begun his sessions he is starting to believe that.

Anna would want him to smile. She had said so. So he smiles, and he laughs, and he lets that be okay.

* * *

 

It is the second anniversary of her accident and the day is unseasonably warm. There will be no ice or sleet tonight. The thought pains him a bit, but it is not the white hot knife it would have been last year.

Time has not made her miss her less, but it has given him the strength to live alongside his loneliness. It has given him room to expand and allow other feelings to live with the constant absence in his chest.

He puts the sunflower bouquet in the vase in front of her tombstone and runs his fingers along the cold stone. He has done this so often that there is a slick part that he has worried into the hard surface. The jeans of his knees are damp as they soak up the morning dew from the grass where he kneels. He takes one callused finger and traces the lines of her name etched into the block along with the inscription.

 _Beloved Sister and Wife_. She had been that and so much more. So much more.

“Hey,” he starts, finding his voice. It has been awhile since he talked to her. “I’m starting to feel okay again. I wasn’t for a long while, but I’m getting better. Elsa is, too. We miss you - but we’re going to make it. We’re going to make it because we know that is what you would have wanted.”

He leans his forehead against the stone. The feel of it is the exact opposite of how Anna had felt in life.

“Wait for me. Wherever you are, wait for me.”

That breezeless wind wraps around him once again in a way he hasn’t felt since that first time over a year ago. Something inside of him tells him that this second time will be the last. Deep within his chest, in that empty space she left, he feels her. He hears her.

_I am. I will._

And then she is gone.

* * *

 

It is a heart attack that does him in. He was outdoors working on Elsa’s yard while she was inside fixing up something to drink when it hits him. His doctor had told him to take it easy, that eighty-five-year-old men were not meant to do hard physical labor, and maybe Kristoff should have listened to him.

There were a lot of things Kristoff should have done, but he didn’t really care about any of them now. The last thing he sees with his living eyes is blue sky spattered with waving green leaves and wispy white clouds. The first thing he sees with his non-living eyes is Anna.

* * *

 

“You’re here. You’re here.” He cannot stop saying that, cannot pull her tight enough his chest.

“Of course I’m here. I’ve been waiting for you. I told you I would.” She holds onto his just as tightly. “But now we can cross over. Elsa will find us.”

He pulls back just enough to take her face in his hands - his young hands to his surprise - and simply stare at her face.

“You don’t know how much I missed you.”

“I do. I do.”

He kisses her. Her pliant mouth opens beneath his, sparking something inside of him that he hadn’t felt since the night she left.

“Don’t leave me again.” He gasps against her mouth.

“I never did.”

“Do go anywhere I can’t follow.”

“I won’t.”

His mouth falls on hers again.

“Promise me.”

He can feel her smile against his lips.

“I promise.”

As his mouth covers her once more he feels a blinding warmth wrap them up in its embrace as they cross to whatever awaits them on the other side together, never to be apart, for the rest of time.


End file.
